Judith James has worked as a legal assistant, trail guide, and for fifteen years as a counselor. Her personal journey has taken her many different places, including the Arctic and the West Coast. She loves music, reading, and traveling to new places, and she’s trying her best to learn how to play the fiddle. After years of looking for the right place to settle, she’s finally found it beside the Atlantic Ocean. Her writing combines her love of history and adventure with her keen interest in the complexities of human nature, and the heart’s capacity to heal
Do you use myspace, facebook, twitter, or other social networking sites? If so, how do we find you on those sites?
I am too busy to maintain one at the moment but I expect to be using Facebook or Myspace soon.
What books are you currently reading?
I wish I could read for enjoyment but I'm too busy writing right now and am glued to research books. I am looking forward to reading books by TJ Bennet a writer friend, and did recently read Fire at Midnight by Lisa Wilkonson which was a great read. I love a mix of history and adventure and she serves it up in spades.
What are your favorite books?
Oh well, I was taught to be modest but I would have to say Broken Wing and Highland Rebel by Judith James. I love anything by Julianne MacLean and am looking forward to her Highland historicals, adore Dorothy Dunnett, and was inspired by Mary Jo Putney, Anne Stuart and of course Laura Kinsale. Did I mention Katherine Sutcliffe and Sharon Kaye Penman? There are so many more I really can't say.
What books would you recommend to your readers?
Anything by any of the ladies I've mentioned. If you're interested in historical reference materials Antonia Frazer has written some wonderful books and is highly readable and I promise you, the diary of Samuel Pepys and that of Grammont are informative, sometimes scandalous, and always entertaining.
Any message to your readers?
My writing has been a little "outside the box" and more than anything it's been the encouragement, lovely letters, thoughtful reviews, and kind wishes and support of readers that has allowed me to get a start in this business. Thank you!I have fallen in love with the Restoration period and Stuart England which to me is one of the most vibrant and exciting periods in English history. I hope I do it justice in Highland Rebel. If you enjoy complex characters and love your romance with a mix of history and adventure, I think you're in for a treat.
What is your book about? Please provide a description.
Highland Rebel, by IPPY Gold Medal winner Judith James tells the story of two outcasts whose struggle for survival draws them together in a partnership based on mutual interest that transforms them both. Jamie Sinclair has learned from an early age to fend for himself. Charming, dangerous, and decidedly amoral, quick wit, good looks, and military prowess have served him well in the courts of two Stuart kings. Adventurer, courtier, mercenary, and spy, he’s a master of disguise who can transform from aristocrat to beggar and disappear in any crowd. When an inconvenient spark of gallantry causes him to marry a maid captured on the battlefield he intends it to be in name only, but Cat Drummond, the idealistic serious-minded daughter of a Highland chieftain, turns his life and his well laid plans upside down. Disguised as beggars, or glittering amongst the courtiers at Whitehall Palace, Cat and Jamie join forces in an age where treachery and adultery are the fashion, and cynicism, cruelty, and barbed wit the qualities most admired, but in a world where family, creed, and princes can’t be trusted, they will find themselves on opposite sides of a conflict that makes them question everything they’ve come to believe, and tests the bounds of friendship, loyalty, and love.
How long have you been at work on this book?
Highland Rebel was completed in about 8 months
How did the idea originate?
It orignated with on the beach, while reading a book by historian Antonia Frazer about women in the seventeenth century. I started wondering how a relationship would develop between two people two people were in many ways opposites, in all ways equal, and more alike than either of them knew. I closed my eyes and a scene and some dialogue flowed from that
Did the book entail any unusual writing habits or places?
Well I did start taking my neowriter to the beach. I didn't have to worry about battery power or getting sand in it. I love this job!